Abstract
Well, talk about anxiety. I watched Story’s movie, The Hottest August, from the confines of my stay-at-home no-journ in the Redhook neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was May 7th, 2020. At the time, total COVID-19 deaths had reached 5,359 in New York City, 20,597 statewide and 256,489 deaths worldwide. It is now May 29th and Minneapolis is engulfed in the flames of insurrection as people respond to the murder of a black man, George Floyd, by Minneapolis police. COVID-19 may have us feel like everything is being fundamentally transformed, but Floyd’s death reminds us, painfully and clearly, that everything is also still the same. It seems impossible to write about Story’s movie, or anything for that matter, outside of this context. Everything is the same. Everything is different. The brush underfoot slowly desiccates, motionless and calm, right up until the moments before ignition.
The Hottest August offers a snapshot of a present that now feels like an increasingly distant past. Story’s movie portrays the banality of late capitalist abundance and a settler futurity that demands, or at least presumes by almost unconscious default, that the future can, should and will look very much like the present. Babies are born, species go extinct, and a ‘stranger’ in NY stops people to ask questions: A call center worker and college student considers herself an entrepreneur and is most worried about being single forever. An auto mechanic sits with his wife, a 61-year-old fitness instructor, and explains to the camera, ‘everyone wants a job, but nobody wants to work’. A college graduate is out of work and unable to get a job in her field, so she boards dogs in the meantime. Sandcastles. Heat. The sand is hot. The city is hot. Amateur astronomy in the park. Pigeons. Subway. Call 311. A gallerist talks about his neoclassical economic epiphanies. A hipster explains his vision of an automated post-work future. It’s 2017.
Watching the movie now, sheltering in place as the city and the nation tries to ‘flatten the curve’, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgia for my New York City past. I spent my first summer in New York City in the late 90s. I found work as a busboy at a restaurant on Union Square and lived in the East Village where four of us shared a studio apartment. The neighbor let his dog shit on the tiny balcony outside our only window, and without air conditioning we got used to battling flies the size of bumblebees and waterbugs the size of mice. I scored a gig interning at a CD-ROM magazine based out of a gorgeous SoHo loft. It was called Trouble & Attitude (remember, this is the 90s). I’m pretty sure T&A did not survive; nor for that matter, did the idea of CD-ROM magazines. Some futures never arrive.
Now its 2020, and everything is both the same and different. Black men are being murdered by police and by white vigilantes who ‘protect’ their neighborhoods by murdering black neighbors. Alongside and through this racial violence, climate change looms behind any sense of a ‘new normal’ even while the term now has begun to reference indefinitely extended social distancing requirements, double digit unemployment and widespread bankruptcies. The Hottest August suggests that even while we (an NYC ‘we’) lack language to talk about climate change’s mundane structure of feeling, we can still register its affect through the banality of those casual caveats that are peppered throughout the smallest of talk: that maybe, or even likely, all of this will be undone; that the conditions of our futurity will be erased by the consequences of our actions. One wonders though, which consequences will come to bear first—a rebellion against the racial state and capitalism, or a rebellion of the biophysical world, whose rhythms are being so thoroughly unmade? As Story suggests, this is not actually a choice; there is no world in which these two forms of violence exist independent of one another. Francoise Verges (2017) calls this the racial capitalocene.
The ‘we’ mentioned above is fraught; a battleground of collectivities and exclusions. It holds within it a gesture towards common dreams that doesn’t always pause to ask whose dreams are being collected in common, and whose are being swept aside. In one of the movie’s rare voiceover narrations, Story quotes Marx, ‘Capital is in practice moved as much and as little by the site of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. Everyone knows that sometime or other the crash must come. But everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Apres moi, le deluge’.
Some people are certainly looking for that shower of gold, while many others are simply looking for much more modest trappings of security and stability. That also means that the coming flood is not the same for all of us: for some it is the inevitability of the business cycle, for others climate change, and for others still it is the ever present risk of racial violence, of becoming Ahmaud Arbery, murdered in Georgia for the crime of jogging while black, or of becoming another Eric Garner, or Mike Brown, or George Floyd or Tamir Rice or Breonna Taylor. The mortal risk of being black in the presence of law enforcement, no matter what you are doing, is undeniably real. A recent study finds that 1 out of every 1,000 black men in America can expect to be murdered by the police (Edwards et al., 2019). What was that about climate change? When racial capital drips, from head to toe, in blood, it can be hard to also pay attention to the dirt.
Now we’ve added to this a new risk, that of finding oneself under economic compulsion to take a job that puts you and your family in grave danger of contracting COVID-19, a virus that seems particularly adept at ravaging those communities of color who are already more vulnerable as a result of intergenerational trauma and structural inequities in health and well-being. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed some of capital’s most brutal contradictions and death-dealing tendencies.
There is an important lesson here about crisis, economy and futurity that also emerges in Story’s movie. People focused on the everyday struggles of survival are not as likely to to orient their futures around the threat of a civilizational crisis, like climate change; not when that civilization offers the racialized, colonized and otherwise marginalized majority forms of permanent insecurity and precarity that make everyday—with or without a viral pandemic—into a crisis. COVID-19 is not unlike climate change in its disproportionate effect on communities of color. While in a proximate sense this virus may be the crisis, in broader terms the crisis is, as Ruth Gilmore (2007) has aptly put it, that racial capitalism creates conditions of unequal vulnerability to premature death.
Subtle as it may be, the generalized anxiety surrounding climate change does not seem, in Story’s movie, to be equally shared or expressed across race and class lines. An African-American woman speaking from her very modest and very clean kitchen narrates hopes for the future through the safety of her children—she wants to get a house so that at the very least, when she is gone, they will have a place in this world to call home. Similarly, a young African-American man who lives in the projects explains that his vision for the future is one in which his potential children are not subjected to the inhumanities of the present. Many people of color know, or at least feel, racial capital’s disregard for them and their kin. Hopes, dreams and worldviews melt into the summer heat; fever dreams without much of a future to speak of. A young skateboarder answers the filmmakers, asking him about the future, ‘oh, we’re fucked’. A young Black Lives Matter activist yells to a crowd of white allies, hands raised in the air. ‘Wake the fuck up white people! This is your America!’
Alongside the generalized anxieties woven through the everyday lives of late capitalist urbanism, the movie also reveals how everyday life persists, how it continues to be lived through and despite the structuring violence of the racial capitalocene. Story shows us wonderfully diverse and profoundly unremarkable snapshots of life being lived: tending to Osprey nests, amateur astronomy, fishing, sunbathing, softball, dancing.
Ayodamola Okunseinde is one of the few recurring characters in the film. He walks us through the rationale and performance of his character, Dr. Tanimowo, an afronaut from the future—a black future—who has returned to the present to assess the ground (Okunseinde, 2015). Okunseinde, and by extension The Hottest August, ask us to consider whose futures seem possible, and how the oppressive heat of the summer, of the changing climate, of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, patterns expectations for what could be. The movie ends with an outdoor dance party, and it is subtly optimistic. Dance, exercise, protest, movement; so many rhythmic flows to find beauty within and through. Movement going nowhere in particular; just the movements of life, of living. Herein lies the endless practice of being in one’s body, of being in the world with others, and with this I think it’s possible to glimpse the possibilities of abundance otherwise. I hope the afronaut reports on these small vestiges of hope when he returns to the future. I hope the afronaut also visits Minneapolis today (May 29th) to see the 3rd Precinct on fire and a world of people experiencing days of revolution, ‘which are equivalent to twenty ordinary years’ (Lefebvre, 2002: 3, quoting Lenin). The afronaut must know that what matters most is not just the fantasies of robot futures or the former cops slouched in barstools reciting well-rehearsed tropes of racist common sense, or any of the other settler futurities on display in the movie, but the dancing, the stretching, the rebelling; the living towards a future that may never have the chance to arrive.